14.1 Criticism, narratology and theory
- Asch, Solomon E. “Forming Impressions of Personality.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 41, no. 3 (1946): 258–290.
- Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Translated by Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. [French original 1970.]
- Barthes, Roland. “The Reality Effect.” In The Rustle of Language, translated by Richard Howard, 141–148. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. [French original 1968.]
- Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. [First edition 1961.]
- Cohn, Dorrit. Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978.
- Delany, Samuel R. “About 5,750 Words.” In The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. Elizabethtown, NY: Dragon Press, 1977.
- Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.
- Emmott, Catherine. Narrative Comprehension: A Discourse Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.
- Fludernik, Monika. Towards a “Natural” Narratology. London: Routledge, 1996.
- Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980.
- Genette, Gérard. Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Horace. Ars Poetica. c. 19 BCE. Available in Classical Literary Criticism, translated by Penelope Murray and T. S. Dorsch. London: Penguin, 2000.
- Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
- Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Translated by Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982.
- Kellman, Steven G. “Grand Openings and Plain: The Poetics of First Lines.” SubStance 6/7, no. 17 (1977): 139–147.
- Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.
- Nuttall, A. D. Openings: Narrative Beginnings from the Epic to the Novel. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
- Perry, Menakhem. “Literary Dynamics: How the Order of a Text Creates Its Meanings.” Poetics Today 1, no. 1–2 (1979): 35–64, 311–361.
- Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987.
- Said, Edward W. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books, 1975.
- Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968.
- Sternberg, Meir. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.
- Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979.
- Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto & Windus, 1957.
- Wood, James. How Fiction Works. London: Jonathan Cape, 2008.
14.2 Cognitive and empirical studies of reading
- Gerrig, Richard J. Experiencing Narrative Worlds: On the Psychological Activities of Reading. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993.
- Green, Melanie C., and Timothy C. Brock. “The Role of Transportation in the Persuasiveness of Public Narratives.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79, no. 5 (2000): 701–721.
- Kuijpers, Moniek M., Frank Hakemulder, Ed S. Tan, and Miruna M. Doicaru. “Exploring Absorbing Reading Experiences: Developing and Validating a Self-Report Scale to Measure Story World Absorption.” Scientific Study of Literature 4, no. 1 (2014): 89–122.
- Zwaan, Rolf A., and Gabriel A. Radvansky. “Situation Models in Language Comprehension and Memory.” Psychological Bulletin 123, no. 2 (1998): 162–185.
14.3 Craft literature
- Gardner, John. The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.
- Leonard, Elmore. “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle.” The New York Times, 16 July 2001. [Later collected as Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, 2007.]
- Lukeman, Noah. The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile. New York: Fireside, 2000.
- Swain, Dwight V. Techniques of the Selling Writer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965.
14.4 Primary texts discussed
Openings are quoted briefly for the purposes of criticism and study. Where a work was not written in English, the translation used is named.
- Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. 1958.
- Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. 1985.
- Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. 1813; Emma. 1815.
- Balzac, Honoré de. Père Goriot. 1835.
- Camus, Albert. L’Étranger. 1942. English versions cited: trans. Stuart Gilbert (1946); trans. Matthew Ward (1988); trans. Sandra Smith (2012).
- Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. 1865.
- Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. 1853.
- Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. 1866. Trans. Constance Garnett.
- Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury. 1929.
- Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925.
- Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. 1857.
- Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier. 1915.
- García Márquez, Gabriel. One Hundred Years of Solitude. 1967. Trans. Gregory Rabassa (1970).
- Gibson, William. Neuromancer. 1984.
- Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965.
- Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. 1989.
- Kafka, Franz. Der Process. 1925. English versions cited: trans. Willa and Edwin Muir (1937); trans. Breon Mitchell (1998).
- Kafka, Franz. Die Verwandlung. 1915.
- Machado de Assis, Joaquim Maria. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. 1881.
- Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. 1851.
- Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 1987.
- Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. 1955.
- Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949.
- Rowling, J. K. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. 1997.
- Saramago, José. Blindness. 1995.
- Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759–1767.
- Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina. 1878; The Death of Ivan Ilyich. 1886.
- Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. 1884.
- Woolf, Virginia. Mrs Dalloway. 1925.
- Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940.
14.5 Second-edition sources
Examples added in the second edition (Core chapter) and the sources used to verify them.
- Herbert, Frank. Dune. 1965. (The gom jabbar held at Paul’s neck by Mohiam, the “old crone” of the opening, in the first chapter; Alia kills Baron Harkonnen with it at the climax: Wikipedia, “Gaius Helen Mohiam”; Inverse, on the Baron’s death in the novel.)
- Honeyman, Gail. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine. London: HarperCollins, 2017. (First-person narrator, Glasgow, a finance clerk of twenty-nine; Costa Debut Novel Award 2017; opening sentence quoted on the Reading Between the Pages blog: Wikipedia, “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine”.)
- Ng, Celeste. Everything I Never Told You. New York: Penguin Press, 2014. (Opening sentences; 3 May 1977, Lydia’s bed not slept in, her body recovered from the lake: Course Hero, chapter 1 summary.)
- Saunders, George. Lincoln in the Bardo. 2017. (Opening sentence spoken by Hans Vollman; passages attributed to named speakers; chapters assembled from quotations of real and invented sources: LitCharts, chapter 1; The Post Calvin.)
- Weir, Andy. Project Hail Mary. 2021. (Opening lines, “What’s two plus two?”; the narrator wakes without memory beside two long-dead crewmates and recovers his name only in chapter 3: BookBrowse excerpt; The Bibliofile recap.)
- Inglourious Basterds. Dir. Quentin Tarantino, 2009. (Chapter One, “Once upon a time… in Nazi-occupied France”, 1941; LaPadite chopping wood; Landa asks for milk, switches to English; the Dreyfus family under the floor; Shosanna escapes: Inglourious Basterds wiki, “Chapter One”.)
- The Sopranos, season 1, episode 1, “The Sopranos” (the pilot). HBO, 10 January 1999; written and directed by David Chase. (Opens in Dr Melfi’s waiting room with Tony and a statue; the episode framed by the sessions, with his account shown in flashback; the ducks: Wikipedia; TV Tropes recap.)